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It’s often hard not to succumb to the built-in stimuli of digital entertainment – especially when it’s everywhere we turn. But we often forget that there’s a lot to be had with just one’s imagination and a little bit of physical energy. So as an alternative to carbon hungry toys that ultimately tout nothing more than flashes on a screen, we’ve rounded up 6 amazing designs that do double duty as a fun toy or game and pay back to the grid. While some are humanitarian designs meant to aid areas struggling with limited resources, and others are just for good clean fun, each of these pieces turn all its human powered input into usable energy that, even in a few cases, can be applied to do a little housework! Check out our Top 6 Designs that harness the power of play! READ MORE >

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Peixe Urbano means, in Portuguese, “Urban Fish”. That’s a fun fact. Here are a few more: Peixe Urbano is a Rio-based Groupon clone that’s doing very nicely indeed by tailoring its service precisely to a Brazilian audience. The site offers 30 deals a week, across multiple cities. According to the company’s own numbers, they’re averaging a little over 1000 purchases per deal: 30,000 sales a week. Peixe Urbano takes 50% commission on every sale. The site’s popularity is growing fast amongst traders too: 300 companies a day apply to have their deals sold through Peixe Urbano. Brazil is one of the more interesting emerging markets: the number of venture capital firms there is growing, as is the number of interesting tech startups emerging. It was for those reasons (and more) that Sarah chose to visit the country as part of the research for her forthcoming book on entrepreneurship in emerging markets. And it was for those reasons that we were keen to invite Peixe Urbano founder Julio Vasconcellos to be this week’s guest on Too Long; Didn’t Watch. We asked Julio about the startup climate in Brazil and demanded that he respond to those who say the country is little more than an incubator for scammers and copycats.Video below.

CrunchBase InformationPeixe UrbanoInformation provided by CrunchBase

Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and her company’s blog.Whether you are actively developing a social media presence for your brand or just dipping your toe in the deep and ever-changing ocean of social media chatter, you probably realize that monitoring and measurement are quite important. Although there is no shortage of social media monitoring tools, each one is a bit different in its approach, methodology, metrics, depth of analysis, channels measured, reports and UI. The existence of this many tools and the fragmentation of the tools market is evidence of the fact that the space is not quite mature, and doesn’t yet have a set of agreed-upon metrics and best practices.In your search for the right tool(s), you should be looking to both monitor and measure your brand on social media. The two terms are used somewhat interchangeably, and although there is some overlap and similarity in business goals, monitoring and measurement are distinct processes. Let’s take a look at each one in a bit more detail.Social Media MonitoringMonitoring (or perhaps the more evocative definition is “listening”) is the process of continuous and immediate discovery of conversations with the purpose of learning, engaging, helping and collaborating. You can do this with anyone, whether it’s your customers, prospects, industry thought leaders, former customers, partners or others. There are also different cues to listen for and different ways to engage. Typically, monitoring has a stronger real-time implication than measurement, as one of the purposes is to track keywords as they appear, with the goal of quick reaction.How it works: Typically, monitoring is performed on a keywords basis. Relevant keywords include your brand name, product name, etc. Based on your keywords, your monitoring system of choice goes out to the social networks you specify, grabs the relevant articles and messages, and hopefully arranges them for easier digestion and action.Why it’s important: My favorite analogy for social media is that it’s like the “largest cocktail party in the world.” It’s a room filled with people driven by one desire to communicate, share, digest and relate, while carrying on many independent conversations. Some of these conversations can be about you, your competitors or your industry. Some of these conversations could be people looking for a product like yours. They will talk about all these topics regardless of whether you are listening or not. However, you wouldn’t know any of this if you weren’t listening.Social Media MeasurementUnlike monitoring, measurement is more concerned with metrics over a specified time period. Whereas monitoring answers the question “Who is talking about [insert keyword] right now and what are they saying?” measurement answers questions of “How did my keywords perform over time?” “How does that compare to my competitors?” and “What are some trends I can glean to make my product more usable by these people who are giving me feedback?”How it works: Similar to monitoring, your system of choice goes out and looks for articles where that specific combination of keywords occurs. It then tabulates these occurrences and presents them to you in relevant data reports. You need to be able to slice and dice the data by source, date, and other dimensions, as well as drill down to the social media “atom” level — the individual message — if you need to.Why it’s important: Unless you are immune from management or client accountability, you will probably be expected to provide some metrics that justify your company’s social media marketing or listening program. But that’s only a part of the story. Constant benchmarking is the only surefire way to know if things are working. Social media is a quickly evolving beast, so if you don’t routinely measure and course-correct, you could be marching down the wrong path. The idea is to “fail fast.”ConclusionAs you can see, social media monitoring and measurement leverage the same data for different business ends. Measurement is crucial for benchmarking and tracking your success over time. It’s what helps you draw comparisons to your peers, analyze the huge ocean of tweets and blog posts, and distill them to a list of actionable insights. Monitoring, on the other hand, lets you listen and respond in real-time and protect your brand from negative word-of-mouth. Clearly, both monitoring and measurement should be a significant part of your social media strategy.More Business Resources from Mashable: - Why Your Company Needs to Embrace Social CRM - How Companies Can Use Sentiment Analysis to Improve Their Business - How Real-Time Data is Changing Business Optimization - 5 Ways To Turn Your Traffic Into Valuable User Data - HOW TO: Make Sure You’re Tracking the Right DataImage courtesy of iStockphoto, 123renderReviews: iStockphotoMore About: analysis, BLOGS, brand, business, data, metrics, small business, social media, social media monitoring, twitterFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for iPhone and iPad

Urbano Erbiste, é amigo meu, maluco, já foi mendigo, dono de empresa e repórter fotográfico do Povo e do Jornal do Brasil (onde trabalha hoje).Gosto das fotos dele, porque mostra o Rio de Janeiro que quase ninguém vê. Fotos fortes que contam histórias tristes, mas caprichadamente fotografadas no momento exato.

Get out of the way, old man! You’re being Disrupted! Screw you, newspapers: blogs are stealing your readers and Craigslist is pillaging your revenue! Take that publishers: Andrew Wiley doesn’t need you and your stupid dead trees! And as for you, hotels – ha! hotels! – if ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, it’s you clowns. Charging $300 a night for a bed and a shower and a tiny plastic enema of shampoo when AirBnB will let you get the same, and more, for $50, so long as you don’t mind the creepy thrill of living in a stranger’s apartment. Kapow! See you in hell, hotels! But of course the old men are fighting back – dusting down their old service uniforms and oiling their muskets and surrounding themselves with legislative sandbags to prolong their pathetic existence for another few months. This week, New York Governor, David Paterson, signed a bill outlawing the use of private dwellings as makeshift hotels. The bill, supported by hotel industry lobbyists (natch), bans rentals of less than 30 days and makes operating a residential apartment as a transient hotel illegal in New York City. Good news for big hotels, bad news for poor old New Yorkers who now find themselves banned from letting space in their apartments using AirBnB or Craigslist. And even worse news for NY-bound tourists who will now struggle to find a room in Manhattan for less than $100 a night (apart from these). As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick puts it, “the internet has made it so that people can be more efficient in things like transportation or short-term housing, and the old guard doesn’t like it one bit, so they come up with regulations like these to outlaw it.” Yeah! Except, no. Disclosure: I like hotels a lot – and I’ve spent much of my life in them. Both of my parents are career-long hoteliers, first managing large corporate chain units and now owning their own hotel in the UK. A couple of years ago I decided to sell almost all of my possessions, abandon my over-priced apartment in London and instead live permanently in hotels – in San Francisco, or wherever in the world I find myself in any given month. I’ve just finished writing a book about hotel living. In the past thirty years I’ve stayed in hundreds – thousands? – of hotels. Some have been amazingly opulent, some adequate, some dreadful, some absolute flea-pit shit holes by the side of highways in Dallas. But every one of them has been licensed to operate as a hotel. Why? Because I don’t want to be burned alive by faulty wiring. Because I don’t want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered. Because I want to pay by credit card and not have that card cloned. Because I want legal recourse if something goes wrong. Call me old-fashioned. In New York, as in many major cities, there is a serious problem with transient hotels. Slum landlords know that even the most scummy city apartment – $500 a month stuff – can deliver that same amount per day simply by packing the place with bunk beds and advertising it on Craigslist or any one of the plethora of foreign language NYC hotel sites as a travelers’ hotel. Not only does this put guests at risk due to a lack of fire exits or basic electrical safety, while causing a living hell of noise and violence and shady goings on for the owners of adjacent apartments – but, given that New York apartment vacancy rates are hovering around 1% (against an 8% national average), it also makes it harder for families to find somewhere else to live when they’re forced out by drug-addled European backpackers armed with camping stoves. And yet, despite all of these sound reasons for outlawing faux-tels, it seems that some people would rather let a Spaniard burn to death, or a family be left homeless, than allow The Man to impede the rise of AirFuckingBnB. Says the opening para of this post by one Sean O’Neill, writing on Newsweek’s budget travel blog… “Hundreds of New Yorkers, like others nationwide, have been making a few extra dollars by using sites such as AirBnB, Crashpadder, Roomorama, and Craigslist to sublet pullout sofas, living rooms, and whole apartments. But that may end soon. This week, New York state senators vote on a bill that would make it illegal for any homeowner or renter to sublet for less than a month.” And says Joe Gebbia, president of AirBnB.com… “We have received over 300 letters from New Yorkers who depend on renting by the night to make ends meet. As everyone knows, NYC is financially a challenging place to live – especially in a down economy. The consequences of this generalised bill will negatively impact thousands of New Yorkers more than by the small number of ‘illegal hotels’.” Yeah, Joe. Screw the small number of “illegal hotels” and the untold misery they cause. Hipsters in peril – that’s the big story here. Except it’s really not. For a start, there’s an explicit exemption in the bill that allows for the letting of rooms in private dwellings if the owner is present (as is often the case in AirBnB lets). And for other lets (absent owners can lend their rooms, but are banned from taking money) State Senator Liz Krueger who sponsored the bill has made it clear that “the city is not going to knock on doors,”; AirBnB users will only fall foul of the law if their neighbours complain. Which they’re perfectly entitled to do. And yet, commentators like Masnick and O’Neill and entrepreneurs like Gebbia are so enraptured by the cult of “Disruption” – that any use of the Internet to circumvent the traditional way of doing things is inherently good – that they can’t help but see the new law as The Man standing in the way of Progress. Or as Masnick puts it “the hotels, which have their high prices and don’t like the competition.” They simply can’t contemplate the heretical idea that sometimes The Man is right, and that some of his laws are created for good reason. That not everyone on the Internet is a Gawker-reading, fixie riding hipster who just wants to share his space with weary travelers for a few bucks extra pot money. That some people on Craigslist are criminals. That sometimes legislation is needed to protect innocent people from those criminals, even if it stops the rest of us us doing precisely what we want. And that one of the dictionary definitions of Disrupt is “to interrupt or impede progress”, rather than the opposite. Blogs disrupting newspapers is great, except when no-one can be held accountable for gross inaccuracies and libels. Online pharmacies disrupting doctors is great until someone is poisoned by Indian ‘viagra’. And advertising rooms on the Internet without legal safeguards is great until the platform is used by gangsters and slum lords to drive families from their apartments and fleece tourists into spending their vacations under unsafe roofs. If AirBnB et al are so smart then they’ll figure out a way to thrive in New York’s new legislative environment. These are, after all, disruptive times. But if they can’t understand the fact that disruption cuts both ways, and that the rights of Internet folk to create awesome new business models doesn’t trump a city’s right to disrupt criminality,  then it’s time for them – not the hotels industry or legislators – to get out of the way. Young man. CrunchBase InformationAirBnBInformation provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase InformationCraigslistInformation provided by CrunchBase

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